Monday, May 3, 2010

I meant to write something here for Earth day updating everyone about the quilt, but time seems to be escaping my life continuously. These last few weeks, I’ve been spending time with several peoples’ uncontainable grief, breaking-- again-- my heart which was already always broken. I have been reading and thinking about grief... and loving. The way we love even though we know that everything dies.

Meanwhile it is Spring in California and everything is very much alive. All morning we’ve been watching a pair of tiny wrens bring straw from the garden into their birdhouse one piece at a time. The house finches have laid four blueish eggs in their nest over the kitchen window. The farm is covered with roses and irises and the bees are out in the warm air working at their continuous gathering. We’ve had an unusually rainy year this year, so all the wildflowers are banks of color on the hills. It is beautiful.

And my mind wanders. Because it is also Spring in the Gulf of Mexico. The brown pelicans have been building their nests in the wetlands of Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. Five species of sea turtle are finishing their journey to sandy shores where they, too, will lay their precious eggs. Blue fin tuna are returning from the open ocean to spawn in the warm waters where the Mississippi river empties her giant body into the gulf. Songbirds- orioles, warblers, swallows-- are at the peak of their migration North over the blue circle of the Gulf on exhausted wings, waiting to reach land again. Spring brings new life. Fragile life. Everywhere.

This oil spill will wash up on the new life of nearly everything: grasses, sedges, birds, fish, people. The broken rig that continues to spill hundreds of thousand of gallons of crude oil into the gulf shows no sign of stopping-- or being contained. News outlets warn of the worst environmental disaster in the US in recent history. Recent must mean in the last few weeks, because these exact coastal communities and ecosystems were shattered by Katrina five years ago. And last month 31 miners were killed in Appalachian mines, a tiny fraction of the devastation caused by mining practices that have endangered local communities, filled in thousands of miles of streams and destroyed more than 450 mountains-- another area the size of Delaware. That seems like a pretty huge environmental disaster to me. Who gets to say which area the size of Delaware is bigger, land or sea?

The news measures time and size in peculiar ways. My friend Sarah who works as an eco chaplain in Appalachia, recently wrote about the cumulative loss of human life and health over time in her mountains-- how it far outstrips the death toll of miners last month. I remember my shock, cleaning up the Cosco-Busan spill in San Francisco Bay, at lifting, not oiled birds, but the stiff bodies of raccoons out of the grass and mud of the Berkeley Marina. They had come down to feast on small contaminated fish washed up on the shore. Like sludge from mines and all toxins, oil moves up the food chain, concentrating itself in larger animals. But we never see cancer declared an environmental disaster.

Appalachia and the Gulf Coast have a lot in common. They contain our poorest and sickest communities in the US, the roots of our deepest music, some of the greatest biodiversity we have, and they are continually being decimated by our collective inability to change our lifestyle.

This is not special calculus. It explains itself.

You can see it with your eyes, reach out and touch it. Except we don’t. Its definitely easier not to. In my reading about grief, denial is the first stage. The one that allows us to continue living, just barely, doing what has to be done. It keeps us from really feeling and so it is useful temporarily, but dangerous in the long term. Adam swam in the Gulf of Mexico every summer of his life, on the beaches of Florida that are now state emergencies. He’s been reading me the news this week, full of names he knows, full of sadness. And I haven’t listened. Not really. Numbness has come, tinged with helplessness, blame, denial. But nothing else. Until this morning. We found two tiny unhatched eggs in an old nest and I thought, suddenly, of Hawksbill sea turtles, a species I love. How their eggs each contain something precious, one more body to add (the way we do with endangered species) to the life count: the ones still left. And I thought of Joanna Macy's Bestiary, which includes the Hawksbill. In grief, it is small details that move us out of denial: particular names, colors, what was heard, remembered. In the presence of these, denial breaks down into everything else: anger, despair, fear, sadness, breath, and, eventually, resilience.

The details are so important. To remember is not the opposite of to forget. It is the opposite of to dis-member. The opposite of undoing our membership in life. The opposite of not seeing, not touching the particulars of everything. I’ve heard a lot of people cursing our government, the conscience-less corporations, the people who created this disaster. I myself have spent all week responding to Adam’s memories with educated venom and statistics. But this morning I remembered one name. I started to remember myself, and the tears came, and the real anger came, and words came, and movement. Here are some names to re-member that we can see and touch, can go on living with a broken heart. They begin to move beneath the news, the measurements, to the heart of everything: our life and resilience; our ability, when we are present in our senses, to respond.

Blog Archive

About Me

The 350 reasons quilt is a community art project to raise awareness about keeping our atmosphere here on planet Earth safe for life. Last year, the world's leading climate scientists determined that 350 parts per million CO2 is the most that our atmosphere can hold and still sustain life as we know it.
Currently, the atmosphere holds 390-- way too much. The quilt was created as part of a global movement (see 350.org) to make October 24, 2009 a global day of action to raise awareness of this most important number on Earth. In December, 2009, the world's leaders are meeting to create new agreements about how to work together on the climate crisis, and 350 needs to be the number they are working for.
Each panel of the 350 Reasons Quilt is a tribute to something that the person who created it loves about life on Earth. All sewn together, the quilt will represent 350 reasons to dedicate our energy, time and creativity to keep Earth's atmosphere below 350! It continues to grow and inspire people. Please participate by creating your own panel and bringing it or mailing it to the quilt project!